Superbloom
This week I'm thrilled to be bringing you an essay from the brain of one of my most favorite people — Christina Brown. Christina is a pop culture scholar and a breakup art expert. She's especially obsessed with one particular breakup album and I'm stoked to share some of her thoughts on it with you! Enjoy.
SUPERBLOOM, Misterwives’ most recent album, came out in July 2020, four months after covid lockdowns began and one month after I’d finished my master’s thesis and graduated in my living room. I was craving art that tackled transition, discomfort, and plunging into the unknown. SUPERBLOOM delivered. Much of the album felt like it was written about the uncertainty and changes so many of us were experiencing at the time of the album’s release. However, the music was not about quarantine. It was about two of the band members (Mandy and Etienne), who had been together for 8 years, getting divorced.
For context, Mandy is the lead singer and songwriter of Misterwives, and Etienne is the drummer. I still cannot fathom the level of grace, emotional literacy, respect, and boundary setting that Mandy and Etienne, along with the rest of the band, had to bring to the creative process in order to produce such an honest album. All of that work comes through in the music, too. There is an intimacy and a nuance to SUPERBLOOM that is, truly, such a gift.
Narratively, SUPERBLOOM begins in the final stages of Mandy and Etienne’s romantic relationship, then moves on to the breakup. The album then takes us through the messy internal aftermath, and finally to the other side, where they both fall in love again, with new people. Every song takes on a different, precise moment in the narrative. Where some breakup albums dwell on similar emotions across multiple tracks, Superbloom holds a crystal up to the light and turns it, showing us something new with each angle.While I love every track on this album, I want to focus on two particular themes - the feelings of one-sidedness and loneliness in the collapse of a relationship, and the internal collapse that happens after the relationship ends.
The second song on the album is one of my favorites, “ghost.” It’s about the stage in a relationship when the connection is fading, and the other person is becoming less and less present, but you’re still in it and holding on. One of the most haunting lyrics in the chorus of “ghost” is “if I can’t have you completely, I’ll have you in between.” That is to say, I will make something whole out of whatever scraps you give me. I will find a way to keep telling myself the story of you even as you fade away. It’s devastating. It’s also a theme that comes up a lot in the first third of the album.
The next song, “whywhywhy,” is also about the frustration of watching something you thought had so much potential fall apart. There is some level of bargaining going on in the grieving process here. Mandy says “Don’t, you’re pulling me under we were meant to stay afloat. I see the embers, they have not yet lost all their glow. Could you try to take a look into my eyes, and tell me why oh why why why?” She’s still fighting for what she thought she had even though that fight is, in many ways, fueled by resentment for the other person who isn’t showing up the way she needs him to. She’s speaking to the experience of holding on to someone at least partially out of spite, which is a very sticky human experience that I wish we talked more about in pop culture. There is so much nuance in the late stages of love.
SUPERBLOOM shifts into Act II with the track “alone.” The song “alone” is a clear continuation of the narrative in “whywhywhy,” with the hope and bargaining stripped away to reveal a more raw iteration of the same exasperation and exhaustion. In the chorus, Mandy sings “I’m so done with lying, done with solo crying, I’m so done with trying alone.” There is nothing more lonely than being in a relationship with someone who isn’t really there, and this song gives that feeling, that anger and frustration, a voice.
The next song, “stories,” isn’t my favorite musically, but it is one of my favorite tracks from a lyrical standpoint. While “stories” speaks to some of the same dynamics as the last two songs, it takes a markedly more melancholy tone, and perhaps a gentler approach. Mandy sings, “I try to stay in love and do it without your help. And now I sing myself to sleep in hotels with lullabies wrapped in lies and stories I tell myself.” While the earlier songs in this act bear witness to louder, more active emotions, “stories” offers me a moment to wrap myself in a blanket and feel the quieter but no less devastating sadness that comes with this brand of loneliness. It also prepares us for the next song.
“valentine’s day” feels like the most literal and biographical representation of the actual breakup on the album. Mandy is still alone, but the other person in the relationship is humanized a little more. She recounts conversations between them, and explicitly refers to their wedding, and how it happened very close to the end of their eight-year-long relationship. It ends with one of my favorite lines from the album: “It’s only half the truth but it’s still true.” To me, this is one of the most nuanced and loving moments of SUPERBLOOM. She’s just spent the first third of the album telling her side of the story with no holds barred, but here she makes space for Etienne’s experiences without minimizing her own. It is true that he is a whole, complex person who probably experienced this breakup and this relationship differently, and that is valid. However, Mandy’s experiences are still wholly true, just as his are. This is the both/and thing therapists are always insisting exists, and I am guessing that this approach is what made the making of this album possible in the first place.
After “valentine’s day,” SUPERBLOOM takes a pretty dramatic turn. The songs in the next leg of the album are about avoiding yourself and your hurt after a breakup by staying in unhealthy habits and behaviors. Honestly, this is the hardest section for me to contend with, but it is also one of the primary reasons why I recommend this album to anyone going through a breakup or transformation.
The song “over the rainbow” is the most explicit nod to the Wizard of Oz on the album (perhaps along with “find my way home”). Narratively, it marks the beginning of a post-breakup bender, taking the singer to a place she doesn’t recognize. She sings, “Nobody wake me from this bad dream, I don’t like it down here, I don’t want to leave.” This song is about the experience of being aware enough to know that you’re about to be self destructive, but also being too far in to want something different. The next track, “it’s my turn,” takes a similar, but slightly less chaotic, stance. In “it’s my turn,” Mandy sings about finally being able to make her own mistakes. She’s ready to acknowledge that she’s making destructive choices, but she’s still vehemently making room for herself to do that as part of whatever process she’s in the middle of. I don’t say “healing” process because that’s not the goal in the narrative at this stage, we can’t see our way out yet.
There are countless records of post-breakup feelings in pop music, but to me these songs feel different. Though they nod to the exterior realities of some destructive behaviors, they stay rooted in the interior experiences Mandy is telling us about. I think it’s really difficult to be honest about the truly ugly aftermath of heartbreak, or any other vulnerable time, so it’s hard for me to find representations of it that resonate. But, it’s an important part of the story. In these songs, Mandy reveals a lot of herself to us, but she also names some experiences I’ve felt but haven’t known how to articulate. That’s what I’m always looking for.
Christina Brown is a writer and educator living in Long Beach, CA. She is the managing editor at Pear Shaped Press and cohost of The Bi Pod: A Queer Podcast. In her free time, you’ll find her writing pop culture think pieces no one asked for, experiencing deep, short-lived obsessions, and trying not to kill her houseplants.
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THE VIBE
ICYMI
Back in July Christina wrote an essay about breakup albums and you should read it!
Our friend Micah Bournes has a great new album out now called DETOX. It’s not a breakup album, but it does have a track about missing your ex.